Hacker News Reader

Comment by whalesalad | Hacker News Reader

I’ve returned to vanilla Debian as of late and it’s refreshing. My gripes are the guided installer always insisting I need a swap partition and no sudo out of the box, but those are easy enough to overcome.

It’s nice to see only a handful of processes running on a new setup.

View on HN

Agreed about the swap partition but Debian has supported sudo out of the box for many years, the UI is just unintuitive. If you leave the root password empty the Debian installer will install sudo for you.

> If you leave the root password empty the Debian installer will install sudo for you.

That's a heck of a gotcha.

No sir, the Debian installer says exactly that [0].

[0] https://i.imgur.com/qIqAVSI.png

You are right, there is indeed text indicating that.

However, even the text itself is worded to leave out the sudo implication to the end of the whole paragraph, which is typically skipped by anyone who simply wants their OS installed.

Not anymore. It was removed in stretch, I think. The reason is that systemd won't let you into single-user mode if the root password is unset.

edit: If, after installing, you install sudo and manually disable the root password, you won't be able to boot to the rescue or emergency targets; a valid root password is now required by default.

If you want them to work without a password, like classic "single-user mode", you can edit both the rescue and emergency unit files, and add the --force flag to sulogin.

"single init=/bin/bash" has served me well since forever

Yup, except only since the advent of systemd in my case, I don't recall ever needing it before that xD

Looks like it's still there:

https://salsa.debian.org/installer-team/user-setup/blob/70b7...

That, and the question for installing popcon during the install, somehow halting the installer in a section between two longer periods of activity.

How that part of the installer works is kinda stupid, too.

The popularity-contest package is installed, you're asked whether you want to participate, and then the package is uninstalled when you say no -- as opposed to asking and then installing the package if you say yes.

Please open a bug for this. I want to see canonicals reasoning...

Tip: to get sudo on debian, just don't enter a root password.

Not anymore, you are required to set a root password now. See my other comment.

I can't speak to that either way (I haven't done a manual installation in a long time) but setting

  d-i passwd/root-login boolean false

in a preseed file seems to still work just fine (to skip "creation" of a root account).

The "sudo" package will be installed and the user created during installation will be added to the "sudo" group.

Good to know, thanks. Note that you'll be locked out of rescue/emergency with that, unless you also modify the unit file for (one or both of) them.

You almost certainly do want swap (in the 99.9% case).

I had a better / more elaborate explanation bookmarked somewhere but can't find it now, the tldr is a "modern" OS (past ~2-3 decades) wants the freedom to manage anonymous (malloc) and named (mmio) memory between physical RAM and disk devices. Disabling swap means the OS must always keep the anonymous pages in physical RAM, which negatively impacts any IO-bound workload (can't cache) and, ironically, puts more pressure on the disk.

So unless you have an extremely specific and finely tuned use-case with lots of benchmark data, the OS will almost always make a better call.

You do probably want swap, but the comment you are replying to is talking about a swap _partition_ and that is not the only way to do swap. Using a file instead makes it easier to change the size of your swap, some people prefer that.

Again, what about sticking to a sensible default that covers the 99.9% case? The installer is hinting you to do the right thing (to create some swap), even if it doesn't provide all the possible myriad options. Swap files vs dedicated partitions have different trade-offs, if you start going that route it's easy to start blaming the installer for having less power/flexibility than invoking debootstrap directly.

Swap file is a more sensible default in this day and age, at least for the desktop.

I actually do not want swap, because I don't want paging to disk. Ever. Just let the process crash.

I have been running swapless for two decades without any issue.

Not providing a paging file only disables one kind of paging.

* http://jdebp.uk./FGA/dont-throw-those-paging-files-away.html

You can bookmark http://jdebp.uk./FGA/dont-throw-those-paging-files-away.html instead. (-:

Reply on news.ycombinator.com